By Laura Hamilton, Associate Research Strategist

The Red Bricks Media Consumer Insights department consists of several functional areas, including keyword research and development, managed by Laura Hamilton. Laura’s approach to keyword research merges practical, data-driven analysis with creative strategy to build the foundation for successful search marketing campaigns. Here, she explains how keyword research can reveal the true character of your audience.

Search engines are often seen exclusively as a tool for finding information and for being found, but to me, they are a window into your soul. Not to get too romantic about it, but from a functional standpoint, you get a real sense of who a person is by analyzing what they search for and how they search (select keywords). Search analysis, or keyword research, enables you to gain key consumer insights which prove to be critical to launching a marketing campaign.

As marketers, our goal is to rationalize, optimize, and materialize. In a data driven medium, it is easy to overlook the human element buried within our results. As a member of the Consumer Insights team, I work by the mantra, “Uncover the unique personalities of the consumer we are trying to reach.” Every search query and every keyword represents an individual and their personality.  If you don’t pause a moment to consider who they are and what their motivation might be, you are missing opportunities to send them a highly targeted message and generate a response.

Keywords are the foundation of a strong search marketing campaign. If your keywords are weak, the engines will not be able to match your ads to the appropriate consumer; no matter how strong your copy or advanced your analytics. Keywords are organic components that also have mathematical properties thanks to the algorithms that translate them. I like to think that a search engine is a large ballet of words dancing with numbers, and when you cross the two together, you get a hybrid of organic beauty, and I’m not just talking about the search results. Your campaign can’t dance if it’s just about the numbers.

Deciding which keywords to choose for your target audience is never easy. You have to walk a fine line between analyzing search counts and prioritizing your brand’s important key terms in order to develop a well-integrated keyword list. Keyword research can help you uncover critical key terms that are not top of mind, search volumes key to developing a budget allocation strategy, and even uncover if people are searching for the wrong spelling of your brand frequently.  Keyword research can inform your entire marketing strategy, and in the end, your keyword list should be a mix of truths, opportunities, and your own bottom line priorities.

I have always found that analyzing audience personality via keyword research is most important when the brand or product is less well-known.  For example, once I worked on building a keyword list for a line of beauty products with low market awareness. By researching and analyzing who the consumer might be as well as what problems the product solves, we uncovered a unique set of keywords. Key terms leveraged for the campaign were motivation-based rather than product-based, and in the end, the product secured the search volume and consumer interest it needed to generate sales.

We use search queries to find ourselves, whether we realize it or not. Rather than stumbling over the same questions in our minds, we open up our browsers and instantly pull up a search engine to seek the answer. Dynamic keyword research considers the personalities as well as the motivations of a target audience: are they lonely? Strong willed? Hungry? In desperate need of a bi-lingual veterinarian? Maybe they are just lost and are in need of a message board to point them in the right direction, or perhaps they need access to Google Maps. So the next time you go to Google, or Yahoo!, or any of the other internet tour guides, ask yourself: “What am I really searching for?” If you try and search like your audience would, you may discover something new about them.

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Tags: consumer insights, customer insights, keyword research, keywords

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 19th, 2009 at 2:54 pm and is filed under Search Engine Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.